May Day melée...

On the morning of May 1st I was on my way to Vasa Museet via a hardware store when I ran into this daunting bunch, the Stockholm City Mounted Police. They were all dec'd out comeplete with riot gear and visors for the horses. At first I thought it was a parade--there were about 25 police vans with flickering blue lights following along behind--so I shadowed the procession up the street. Pretty soon I noticed that there was slimy goo and broken eggshells sliding down the sides of several of the vans. Something was up.

I followed them to Sergels Torg, the central square in Stockholm where I found hundreds of demonstrators surging in from all directions. The police with their bright yellow padded vests, crash helmets, and batons drove their procesion of horses and vans off onto the curb, lined up and quietly stood there at one side of the square watching.

The crowd was loud but pretty orderly. Whoever had been heaving eggs earlier certainly didn't seem to represent the majority. Indeed, most of the demonstrators almost seemed not to notice the police at all. In typical Swedish fashion, the whole event was relatively calm, orderly, and logical. Free to drop my guard a bit, I decided it was time to worm my way into the throngs of people and figure out what was going on.

It was May Day, International Worker's Day. In a socialist country like Sweden that meant a national holiday. When I reached Vasa Museet an hour later I found the office section virtually abandoned. But in the square, workers with a particularly strong proliterian self-image were congregating to voice their political views. Here, this banner reads "Freedom between people, war between classes."

Other demonstrators had different agendas to push. This banner reads "For Korea's free and independant reunification."

However, the most facinating for me, a student of the Cold War, to see was the presence of the Swedish Communist Party. Apparently they've always been present since 1917 and although Sweden is a socialist country and therefore pretty far left, the communists are still widely known as 'leftist extremists' and have never had a particularly large following.

Ye tthey still managed to drive an old beater Volvo truck up to the edge of the sunken square with a load of speakers in the truck bed...

..and spend half the day making speeches about Marx, Lenin, and a communist vision for Sweden. After all, it was May Day. But it was still a little creepy--look at this guy's hammar and sickle armband.

Then there was this group. I had no idea what they were demonstrating for; bring back the Ghostbusters movies again? --But there's that UN wreath and the Rotary Club gear.

Meanwhile, the police continued to stand guard over the event, ready to intervene if anything got violent. However, as the hours ticked by and no such un-Swedish act occurred, they relaxed, took off their helmets and spent their time chatting.

Then as the communists continued to militantly shake fists, shout slogans, and spit into the microphone (some political styles never die) the crowd wandered off to neighboring Kungsträdgården, a big park where the Left Party (Vänsterpartiet) was putting on an International Workers' Day rock concert. Judging by how people 'voted with their feet', the proliteriat of Sweden was looking for entertainment, not revolution.